Readings and musings

This is hands down the best entrepreneurship book I've read this year. Below are my notes on Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters. Yes, I realize I've taken notes on a book based on the notes that someone else took: Blake was a student in Thiel's Stanford CS183 class and took such extensive and helpful class notes that his site and notes got a lot of attention on the web. It is the lessons from that class that form the basis of this book.

I really enjoyed Thiel's "Competition is for Losers" article in the WSJ, which was effectively chapter 3 of his book. It provides a great taste of Peter's contrarian and thought-provoking ideas. I can easily see Peter giving a TED talk about the concepts in this book as they are so different from the conventional wisdom I hear repeated everywhere and really makes me question a lot of assumptions about what a good business really is. Also, as a magician, I especially loved the sections about searching out secrets (of the universe and of people) because those are the things that are the seeds of valuable opportunities.

I just finished reading The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Inventionby William Rosen, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was quite a long book, and I expected it to be a history of the locomotive. While it did get to that point, the focus was really on the history of the science of invention in the Industrial Revolution, most notably of the steam engine and all its related "technologies." But in the words of Randy Pausch, that's just the head fake: what this book is really about is the most powerful idea in the world -- which is not the steam engine or one of the technologies but is in fact the idea of intellectual property and invention.

The book goes very deep into the physics that was developed in the 18th and 19th centuries and the individuals who made the huge advances, and it argues that it was Britain's nacent intellectual property and patent laws that properly incentivized individuals to invent and make the extremely drastic advances in productivity that the Industrial Revolution is known for. The idea that you should be able to benefit and own what you create, all the while sharing the benefits of your creation with society, is very powerful and is likely at the core of why America (originally a British colony) turned out to be such a fertile ground for the invention culture to blossom (as America continued to build on Britain's patent laws).

While this book is about the 1800s, the process of invention and tinkering that it describes is no less relevant for 21st century entrepreneurs.

As the author writes in the book, "the most important invention of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself," and understanding this process and how it was intentionally fostered and supported was the part of this book that I enjoyed most.

I just finished reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, who was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon working on virtual reality (and spent some time as a Disney Imagineer!). It was a bittersweet tale of a professor in the last few months of his life as he recounted his life's dreams and his preparation for leaving his wife and kids live their life without him. It was inspirational, funny, and thought-provoking, and I was impressed by the humanity and humility of such an intelligent, scientific man.

Below is the actual video of his lecture at CMU, and below that are my main takeaways and nuggets from the book. It's so wonderful that he could share such meaningful lessons with the world.